Cuil: Review of A New Search Engine

Cuil is a new search engine, developed by a team of ex-Googlers and other clever search folk from institutions like Altavista and IBM.

Pronounced "cool," Cuil claims to be the world's largest search engine, indexing three times as many pages as Google.

I tried it out, and it still very rough around the edges. At this stage, Cuil certainly doesn't understand British concepts, interrelationships or present coherent results. And it was a disappointing search experience.

Try putting in "Prime Minister Gordon Brown" and the top results are perplexing, with a focus on the White House and not a single mention of anything to do with 10 Downing Street. And lots of photos of the Dalai Lama and logos from the Medical Research Council.

My litmus test is searching for myself (I would usually use the verb Googling, but in this case it is Cuiling?). Cuil incorrectly combined various results pertaining both the the Internet marketing Susan Hallam, and the musician with the same name. And most annoyingly, it displayed cheesy images pulled from some random bank of ugly pictures.

And intriguingly, if you search for "cuil" using the Cuil search engine.... there is no mention of their own service. Although Google brings up lots of stories about how the shiny new search engine isn't working.

So, it isn't a Google Slayer yet, but keep in mind it took Google a while to reach it's position of prominence.

So what makes makes Cuil different from the other search engines?

• rather than basing results on link popularity, Cuil is a "contextual" engine ranking results on content, concepts, interrelationships, and page coherency
• the search results are presented more like a proper web page rather than just a long list of web pages. If you try it out, make sure to look at the tabs across the top of the page, and the category suggestions on the right.
• Cuil is not "spying" on its searchers, keeping searching activity private.

It's a shame it has been launched before it is able to delight searchers with quality results, but no doubt worth keeping an eye on developments.

Google is a Superbrand

Google is Super. We all knew that, but Google is officially the UK consumer Superbrand, as chosen by 2,200 UK consumers participating in an independent YouGov poll commissioned by Superbrands.

Google has knocked Microsoft out of the top spot, and together they sit in the top ten along with Mercedes-Benz, BBC, British Airways, Royal Doulton, BMW, Bosch, Nike and Sony.

Apple lurks just outside the top 10. Yahoo! lags behind way down at 75. Adobe scrapes in at a surprisingly low 278.

So what is a Superbrand?

?A Superbrand has established the finest reputation in its field. It offers customers significant emotional and tangible advantages over other brands, which (consciously or sub-consciously) customers want and recognise.? All Superbrands must represent quality, reliability, and distinction.

Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the Superbrands Council which commissioned the research, said: "Lifestyle brands, particularly those in the technology sector, have considerably more sway with the public than everyday staples such as the supermarkets, which now seem further than ever from the affections of the British people.

"The results are also a further sign that Google is continuing its dominance in the UK. It is clear that Google is the brand that people value at work and in their personal lives."

PageRank Sculpting and "PageRank Juice"

PageRank Sculpting is a search engine optimisation technique that manipulates the flow of PageRank "juice" as one page links to another page.

At its very simplest, the theory goes that a link to a page counts as a vote for that page. If a page has lots of links to a lots of different pages, then the value of the votes are diluted, making each vote worth less.

PageRank Sculpting utilises the "nofollow" attribute on selected links, thus instructing Google that it should not pass any "link juice" to pages that aren't important.

Typical use of the nofollow link attribute might be on links to your Terms & Conditions page, or your Privacy Policy, or your Accessibility page. You aren't keen to have these pages rank well in the search engine results, and so you don't want to pass any link juice to these pages from your Home Page.

But you could also use Page Rank Sculpting to try to focus deliberately focus link juice on your most important products and services, at the expense of other links to pages on your site.

Page Rank Sculpting takes quite a lot of planning and effort, and so what you want to be asking yourself is is it worth it?

Maybe, maybe not.

• For most small business websites, having a well planned site will naturally give the same effect as deliberate Page Rank Sculpting. You are likely to have links to the content that is most useful to your visitors. You are likely to have fewer links to less important stuff. And you don't link to the irrelevant stuff.

• You might be better off using your time instead to generate great content, or work on getting links from high quality, relevant sites.

• If you try to be too clever using the nofollow attribute, then you risk damaging your visibility in the search engines if you get it wrong.
  

• And Page Rank Sculpting is only of secondary importance to the main focus of your search engine optimisation: content and reputation.
  

• A good example of where Page Rank sculpting is appropriate would be a large e-commerce website where a category page will have multiple links to the same product page: a link from the picture of the product, another link from the name of the product, and finally an identical link coming from "Product Info". Using page rank sculpting means you would tell Google to ignore 2 of those 3 identical links, and focus all the link juice on the one link, thus making it more important.

Improvements to Google Keyword Tool

Google have added a very useful piece of information to their free Keyword Research Tool: it now displays an approximate number of searches for each phrase from the previous month search data.


Google's official announcement confirms that it displays the approximate number of searches taking place Google and the wider search network during the previous month, as well as an average monthly search volume of the last 12 months.

Looking carefully at these numbers, they do look very approximate, but it is certainly better than those silly little green fuel gauge icons that they used to display.

Google delivers keyword results and statistics based on your IP address, which means that for most of my readers the numbers are going to be for searching activity in the UK.

Be sure to use the "Show/Hide Columns" option to suppress the Adwords advertising figures if they are not of interest.

Viral Marketing, Social Media & Blogs: New UK Laws

Are you ever tempted to create a bogus blog, and pretend to be one of your own happy customers? Attracted by the chance to write some glowing online reviews of your own business? How about asking your staff or marketing agency to create phony evaluations of your products or services?

Big changes in the law covering business blogging, social media and viral marketing techniques means businesses need to think twice before pretending to be the "voice of the people."

The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations bans 31 unfair commercial practices designed to protect consumers from misleading, aggressive or unfair practices.

In particular, the legislation outlaws any marketing that is in fact a disguised commercial message.

In the online marketing world, banned activities for businesses include:

• writing fake reviews on sites like TripAdvisor or Google Maps
• creating fake blogs
• asking questions on Q&A sites, and then answering the question yourself
  
• editing Wikipedia entries under a false identity
• imitating a consumer
• falsely advertising on social media sites

The use of false Internet marketing techniques has spawned a whole new vocabulary:

Flogs or "fake blogs" posing as a consumer, but created by professionals with the aim of selling products. One of the best known phony flogs is "All I Want for Christmas is a PSP" - created by a marketing agency called on behalf of Sony; Walmart has done a fake blog and been caught and shamed, and so have L'Oreal and lots more.

Astroturfing or fake grassroots campaigns, such as those used during political campaigns.

The penalty if you break the law? A little visit from Trading Standards, followed by fines up to £5,000, and up to two years in prison for individual directors or senior managers who are guilty of "consenting, conniving or negligently" breaking the rules.

How Much Do Internet Marketing Companies Charge?

E-consultancy have published their annual Digital Rate Card Survey, and it makes for interesting reading both for clients purchasing Internet services, as well as for agencies looking to benchmark their fees.

Small and medium sized businesses still dominate the digital marketing sector, with more than half of all agencies having fewer than 10 employees:



A relatively small proportion of digital agencies are located outside of London, with the Midlands being relatively poorly represented:


The daily rate for Directors of online marketing businesses outside the South East averages £802 per day:


The report includes daily rates by agency size for a number of different roles. For small agencies the average daily charge out rates seem to be averaging around the £575 mark:

Technical roles: £577
Online marketing strategists: £575
SEO consultants: £588
PPC consultant: £572

And finally, digital marketing remains a high growth sector with agencies projecting to grow their turnover by 28% year on year in 2008.

Ashley Friedlein, CEO of E-consultancy, comments: "With 11% of UK agencies reporting growth of 100% or more, year-on-year, optimism within this thriving sector is well-founded.

Can Google Index Flash? Yes!

At long last, Google has announced that it can index Flash content.

Until now, websites built in Flash were notorious for being invisible to the search engines. Flash content was a "roadblock" - a big black hole that the search engine spiders couldn't index.

All that is changing with Google's new algorithm that finds textual content in your Flash SWF files. That means Google will be able to index textual content in your Flash files, as well as see and follow URLs and links.

And as a result Flash results will start to appear more commonly in the Google search engine results. In particular, the "snippets" of text that appear in the Google search results are likely to be more relevant and compelling.

Yahoo! will also be taking advantage of this new development, but poor Microsoft is once again Billy No Mates and hasn't been let in on the indexing party. Silverlight, and all that....

In principle, existing Flash sites do not have to make any changes in order to start the indexing process. But with regards to search engine optimising your Flash files, Adobe's press release says, "As with HTML content, best practices will emerge over time for creating SWF content that is more optimized for search engine rankings."

Keep in mind that Google will not be able to index images in the Flash, nor text that is displayed as an image.

Read more in Vanessa Fox's overview of this new Flash development.